Tales from the INI: Bananas and the Balkan Cartel
The Balkan cartel had exclusive loading rights in the president’s containers. Standard screening saw a banana company.
Pull up a counterparty profile on Noboa Trading Co TCN SA and the results are unremarkable. A registered Ecuadorian exporter, producing bananas under the Bonita brand, shipping across European markets, Ecuador’s fourth-largest banana exporter by volume. No adverse media. No sanctions. No enforcement actions.
The Belgian importer is equally clean. Firma Leon Van Parys NV, registered in Antwerp, carries more than 1,747 recorded South American shipments and is the single largest purchaser of Ecuadorian bananas for the Croatian market. Its turnover runs to hundreds of millions of euros. The vessel is MSC Mirella, operated by Mediterranean Shipping Company, one of the world’s largest container lines. The commodity is bananas.
Majority ownership of Noboa Trading runs through Lanfranco Holding SA, a Panamanian company. Standard registry checks return its incorporation status and nothing else. The beneficial owners are not publicly named.
At every node in this supply chain, exporter, importer, carrier, commodity, a counterparty screening check returns the same result: clean.
Between 2020 and 2025, authorities seized at least eight cocaine shipments concealed in containers belonging to Noboa group companies. Not one of those seizures produced an adverse entity-level flag on any direct counterparty in the chain.
Eight seizures that changed nothing
In February 2021, investigators decrypting Sky ECC messages found a Serbian organized crime figure boasting in an encrypted chat that no one but his network was permitted to load cocaine into Noboa Trading containers at Guayaquil port. Exclusive rights. His name was Nikola Djordjevic, operating under Sky ECC PIN F0804D. He managed the Ecuador end of the loading operation and remains a fugitive. A Serbian international arrest warrant was issued in May 2023. He was indicted in November 2023 as part of the broader Balkan Cartel prosecution.
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) matched three of those shipments, 535 kg of cocaine in total, to specific container numbers, dates, and vessel references in the decrypted messages. All three sailed aboard MSC Mirella in late 2020 and early 2021, consigned to Firma Leon Van Parys in Antwerp. Darko Saric directed the European distribution end from his prison cell via Sky ECC. His original 20-year conviction for smuggling 5.7 tonnes of cocaine to Europe was annulled by the Belgrade Appeals Court in May 2025; a retrial is now pending. Petar Cosic managed the Croatian port offloading at Saric’s direction, taking a 20% cut per shipment. His trial in Croatia, on charges including organizing a criminal organization and aggravated murder, is ongoing.
The ownership structure runs deeper. Lanfranco Holding SA holds 51% of Noboa Trading. A June 2015 Pandora Papers document names Daniel Noboa and his brother Juan Sebastian Noboa Azín as its final beneficiaries. This was not disclosed at the time of Noboa’s election, in potential violation of Ecuadorian electoral law. Inside the company, Noboa Trading’s anti-narcotics contractor Jose Luis Rivera Baquerizo was arrested multiple times in connection with cocaine seized from company containers. After his August 2020 arrest, Edgar Lama Von Buchwald facilitated his release. Lama Von Buchwald was then a Noboa political advisor. He is now Ecuador’s Minister of Health.
The seizures continued after Noboa assumed the presidency. In April 2024, police intercepted 76 kg at Naportec port. In March 2025, 2.3 tonnes were seized from a Blasti SA warehouse at DP World Posorja, destined for Antwerp. Blasti is owned by Noboa’s aunt and cousins and shares a company manager with Noboa Trading. Container cloning was detected. A judge replaced preventive detention for the arrested workers with travel bans within weeks.
That seizure fell during Ecuador’s presidential campaign. At a televised debate on 23 March 2025, opposition candidate Luisa González confronted Noboa directly: “They export drugs in banana boxes belonging to Mr. Daniel Noboa’s company to Croatia and Italy.” Noboa acknowledged that trafficking had occurred through company containers while denying personal wrongdoing. He won the election on 13 April 2025 with 55.6% of the vote. No personal criminal charges have been filed against him.
Beneficial ownership and network adjacency
Firma Leon Van Parys NV faces no Belgian investigation, no charges, and no regulatory action. OCCRP’s comment request to the company went unanswered. At the entity level, its profile is clean.
That is the structural problem. The European Union (EU) Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive and existing anti-money laundering obligations already require financial institutions and large corporates to look beyond their direct counterparties. Standard know your customer tooling does not. It checks the name, the registration, the sanctions list. It does not see the network.
Belgian authorities seized 116 tonnes of cocaine at the Port of Antwerp in 2023 and 110 tonnes in 2024. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime identifies Antwerp and Rotterdam as the primary European entry points for Ecuadorian cocaine shipments. The trade volumes that make both ports indispensable to legitimate commerce are the same volumes that make full container inspection impossible.
The Balkan Cartel’s documented money laundering methodology was engineered for exactly this environment: simulated international commercial operations, fictitious contracts with local banana producers, cryptocurrency layering, designed to present as ordinary trade flows at every point of contact.
Three risk dimensions in this case fall outside entity-level screening. The first is beneficial ownership: Lanfranco Holding names no public beneficiaries. The second is network adjacency: Djordjevic, Saric, and the Balkan Cartel. The third is contractor relationships: Rivera Baquerizo and Lama Von Buchwald. Evidencity’s INI maps all three.
Eight seizures, two continents, one supply chain
The criminal network operating inside a banana supply chain that began in Ecuador was designed to be invisible.
The risk in this case is systemic. Legitimate commodity trade infrastructure became the vector for criminal logistics, and no standard screening tool was built to see the network operating inside it.
Evidencity’s INI maps dozens of relationships to the Balkan Cartel node, with connections running across Los Lobos, Los Tiguerones, and Los Lagartos throughout Ecuador’s port infrastructure. Since September 2025, two of those groups, Los Choneros and Los Lobos, have been designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists by the US State Department and the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). For any financial institution with US nexus involved in Ecuadorian trade finance, undiscovered supply chain exposure to either group creates active OFAC liability. Entity-level screening does not see it.
The Balkan Cartel had exclusive loading rights in one exporter’s containers. Which exporter’s containers are they in now?
